Working as Moor Mother, the Philadelphia poet and musician Camae Ayewa styles her music for sensory overload. Compressing hip-hop, punk, industrial, electronic, and noise music into a siren blare, she thrusts hundreds of years of brutal injustices in our faces, as if hoping to cram as much information through as small an opening as possible. The brevity of her songs often reflects this exigency: In discussing the throttling 83 seconds of “Deadbeat Protest” (from her 2016 album Fetish Bones) during a Red Bull Music Academy lecture, Ayewa said such brevity was “to get all the information in a short amount of time.”
As a member of the jazz ensemble Irreversible Entanglements, Ayewa’s approach to time has shifted. Within the expanse of the form, she knows she can convey the same urgent information at a much slower pace, allowing the group—horn players Keir Neuringer and Aquiles Navarro, bassist Luke Stewart, drummer Tcheser Holmes—to elevate her into new places. She picks her spots within the music accordingly, punctuating each of the album’s five expansive compositions.
Space defines the album, the band evoking our American topography, both physically and psychologically, capturing what’s in the news and what’s been repressed underneath that surface. At times, their 2017 debut album felt like a travelogue, and “The Code Noir/ Amina” continues that trajectory, with Ayewa evoking the Deep South, Holy Hill, and South Carolina. Whereas a Moor Mother song would typically clock out well before the two-minute mark, here she’s only just getting started by then, conveying a stunning image of scorched earth: “A mountain ain’t nothin but a tombstone for fire.” Stewart’s bass and Holmes’ drums keep everything at a rolling boil as the horn lines rove, expand, and Ayewa’s focus widens. She speaks of the void, the African ancestors who actually built America and died nameless, then asks: “At what point do we give a shit, do we stand up and say something?”
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That’s not the only question she asks. The 15-minute title track begins by interrogating a beat cop, then expands to “stop and frisk” policies in general, and ultimately encompasses the sense that for most communities of color, the local police department is an occupying force at best. Ayewa, Neuringer, and Stewart first played together at a Musicians Against Police Brutality event, organized after the NYPD shot and killed Caribbean immigrant Akai Gurley, and as the band roars toward a furious climax, they even invoke Gurley’s name. Yet right at the peak, Ayewa’s voice vanishes and everything drops away to near-silence. Spare horn lines rise and evoke the eerie space of electric Miles, the mood changed entirely. Five minutes pass before she’s heard again, her voice contemplative now, speaking of a brief feeling of freedom that “tasted so good,” a joy measured in gasps.
Perhaps the group’s most remarkable attribute is that while anger is ever-present, the fury is tempered, the music focused and controlled. As Ayewa’s inquisitive gaze turns inward on the sinewy Latin-tinged groove of “No Mas,” she remains resolved “to love ourselves fully.” Built from a walking bassline and clanging hand percussion, “Bread Out of Stone” never rises above a simmer to convey the message of resilience in the face of oppression. The shrieking, flailing properties of free jazz are often interpreted as unbridled anger, rising as it did during the heights of the Civil Rights era and inner-city unrest. And while Irreversible Entanglements draws on that tradition, they aren’t merely mimicking an older version of jazz. They are making it resonate now, emphasizing it as a music of ritual, much like Ayewa’s other loves, like gospel and blues. It conveys all of the urgency of her raw, earlier work now across a greater vista, untethered by time yet wholly in the present.
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